commercial redistribute issues for free and open source softwares licenses [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 9 yea开发者_高级运维rs ago.

Improve this question

guys, could you please explain what are restrictions for commercial redistribution for these licenses (Apache , BSD , GNU GPL , GNU LGPL , MIT , MPL).

best regards.

---

In short - the Open licenses (Apache, BSD, MIT) allow just about any type of use, commercial or not, with virtually no strings attached (or control for you over your potential competitors or people who want to 'cheat'), whereas the Free Licenses (GPL, LGPL, etc) generally require you to always provide some rights to the source code to whomever you distribute your release to and this license limits your commercial options.

However above is a gross simplification - and this is far too big a question to be answered here - and to a some extend depends on the country you live in and the countries you do business with.

One of the most authoritative works is http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm - Lawrence Rosen's book Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law (ISBN 0-13-148787-6). You are after Chapter 10 - http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch10.pdf -- choosing an open source license. If that is too heavy http://4cff.org/default/index.cfm?LinkServID=C502415F-0288-0063-B060110EE1599F24&showMeta=0 and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-license.html are much shorter and easier to digest - but are not quite as thourough.

Another good source of information is http://www.opensource.org/.

Thanks,

Dw.